How to get a configurable products parent in Magento

Jan 20, 2012 · 1 minute read
Category: magento

I recently needed magento to be able to load a product, and if that product was part of a configurable product detect this and return the parent product if that existed. Looking around google I came across this code snippet and thought it should work

$_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($productId);
$parentIdArray = $_product->loadParentProductIds()
                 ->getData('parent_product_ids');
if(!empty($parentIdArray)) {
    // do something
}

The problem is that the loadParentProductIds method was depreciated in 1.4.2.0 and I’m running 1.6. The new way of doing detecting if a product has a parent is to do this

$configurable_product_model = Mage::getModel('catalog/product_type_configurable');
$parentIdArray= $configurable_product_model->getParentIdsByChild($productId);
if(!empty($parentIdArray)) {
    // do something
}

Using this method I overrode the Mage_Catalog_Model_Product class and added this method, which will always return a configurable product if the product is associated with one. Be aware, that if you products belong to more than one configurable product you will have to modify the logic

public function getConfigurableProduct() {
	switch ($this->type_id) {
		case 'configurable':
			return $this;
			break;
		default:
			$configurable_product_model = Mage::getModel('catalog/product_type_configurable');
			$parentId= $configurable_product_model->getParentIdsByChild($this->getId());
			if(isset($parentId[0])) {
				$this->load($parentId[0]);
			}
			break;
	}

	return $this;
}